The 21st Annual Meeting of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) Long-Term Ecological Research Program took place on Wednesday and Thursday, 23-24 October in Baltimore, MD at the University of Baltimore. The Research Conference shared updates and results of project investigations with all BES collaborators, interested researchers, educators, local, state and federal agency representatives, media, and community members. 

Two of Dr. Claire Welty's students  presented at the conference: 

• Joey Mowery (Chemical Engineering  '21, Environmental Engineering and Sustainability Track) presented his first poster at the BES Annual Meeting. His poster was titled: 'Developing a workflow for stormwater modeling in older cities having missing asset data'. 
• Mahdad Talebpour (Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Candidate) gave a talk on part of his PhD research, titled 'Development and testing an urban hyper-resolution fully-coupled subsurface-land surface-atmosphere model'. #UrbanHydrometeorology

Emily Godfrey is a Dance major with a minor in Psychology, who will graduate in May, 2020. She is a URA Scholar and a Linehan Artists Scholar. She performed her piece, "stoP ActiNg hysterICal” at last year's URCAD, and will present again this year.

Title of your research project:
Contemporary Choreographic Perspectives

Describe your project:
My project is to research performance and choreographic techniques from various contemporary/modern companies and utilizes that information to create my Senior Capstone Work, a twelve-minute dance performed by four dancers. Over the summer, I studied with the Paul Taylor Modern Dance Company (founded in 1954) and the Peridance Contemporary Dance Company (founded in 1984). This winter, I will be studying abroad with Ann Sofie Clemmensen to Denmark to research international contemporary techniques.

Who is your mentor(s) for your project?
Professor Carol Hess is the chair of the dance department and has mentored me throughout my university experience, offering guidance from course work to compositional ideas. I have a very trusting relationship with her and I really value her advice and input.

How did you become interested in this project?
I wanted to gather as much research and experience in the process of creating my senior capstone work. I wanted to continue my dance technique training while jumping in to a company lifestyle to gain a better understanding of the career I was pursuing. I learned of the Paul Taylor Modern Dance Company through a UMBC faculty member, Constance Dinapoli, and I discovered the work of the Peridance Contemporary Dance Company when a UMBC alumni became an apprentice there.
Those companies, though vastly different in style, carry choreographic ideas and themes that captured my attention.

What has been the hardest part about your research/what was the most unexpected thing about being a researcher?
A natural change in creating a new choreographic work is translating my artistic vision to my dancers while allowing their own artistry and interpretation. All the dancers I am working with are inexperienced learning movement created by a student choreographer and performing in the modern-contemporary genre. During the process of creating the work, I had to take my time and have patience explaining the different movement styles because what was natural to me was foreign to them. Another challenge, while expected was nevertheless difficult, was working within a constrained amount of time, to complete and premier the work.

What has been the most rewarding part?
The work premiered November 8th and 9th, and when I was able to watch the piece in full performance mode, I felt fulfilled. I had been focusing on tiny (but important) details and giving my cast reminders right before the show, unsure if they would be able to embody everything. Watching the piece and hearing the audiences reaction, everyone taking their own meaning but the movement still resonating within them, was the most rewarding.

How will you disseminate your research?
I plan to present my research at URCAD 2020 by premiering my senior capstone piece again. Prior to the next performance, I plan to look over the piece and discuss with my mentor any changes or adjustments I can make.

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research?
Research derives from your passion(s), the need to explore, discover, and create. The work is never quite done, but that is what makes the research thrilling. For myself, dance is forever evolving and changing, and I know that there will always be new inspiration and the need to share my creative outlook.

What are your career goals?
After I graduate in Spring 2020, I plan to work with a professional dance company under contract while still creating pieces to gain a choreographic fellowship.

The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

Reasoning About Time in a Crypto Protocol Analysis Tool

Dr. Catherine Meadows, Naval Research Laboratory

12:00–1:00pm Friday, 15 November 2019, ITE 227

The ability to guarantee timing properties, and in turn to use assumption about time to guarantee the security of protocols, is important to many of the applications we rely upon. For example, to compute locations, GPS depends on time synchronization between entities. Blockchain protocols require loose time synchronization to guarantee agreement on block timestamps. Distance-bounding protocols use the roundtrip time of an RF signal to enforce constraints on location. To analyze these types protocols formally, it is necessary to reason about time. This talk describes recent research in extending the Maude-NPA cryptographic protocol analysis tool to reason about cryptographic protocols that rely on or enforce timing properties. We describe the timing model we have created for the tool. We show how we we represent timing properties as constraints, whose solution is outsourced to an SMT solver. We also discuss our experimental results.

Catherine Meadows is a senior researcher in computer security at the Center for High Assurance Systems at the Naval Research Laboratory and heads that group’s Formal Methods Section. She was the principal developer of the NRL Protocol Analyzer (NPA), which was one of the first software tools to find previously undiscovered flaws in cryptographic protocols, and was used successfully in the analysis of a number of protocol standards. She is also leading, or has recently led, a number of projects related to the design and analysis of cryptographic protocols, including one focused the development of an analysis tool, Maude-NPA, that takes into account the the complex algebraic properties of cryptosystems, another that is focusing on the automatic generation of secure cryptosystems, and another devoted to formal methods for the design of cyber-physical systems with legacy components.

This work was supported by ONR 321 (*protected email*)

Host: Alan T. Sherman, *protected email* Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant 175368. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays. All meetings are open to the public. Upcoming CDL Events:

• December 6, Karl Henderson, Verisign
• 9am—5pm daily, January 13-17, UMBC SFS/CySP Research Study, ITE 456
• January 31, 2020, TBA, biweekly CDL talks resume

The post TALK: Reasoning About Time in a Crypto Protocol Analysis Tool appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

URCAD is Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Submission deadline: February 15, 2021

Name: Bianca Monge

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Leidos

Position Title: Cybersecurity Analyst Intern

Major(s)/Minor(s): Information Systems

Current Class Level: Senior

Work Term: Summer 2019

Tell us about your internship, co-op, or research opportunity, including your day-to-day responsibilities.

During my internship, I worked within the Cyber & SIGINT department of the Intel group as a Cybersecurity Analyst Intern. My project over the summer was to research a product pitched to our company that would be able to prevent software memory corruption attacks. My team and I researched, analyzed, and tested the product to document its effectiveness and faults. Not only did we test its functionality as a cyber hardening product, but we also looked at if and how it could be misused in the wrong hands. The areas of cybersecurity that my day-to-day responsibilities entailed were buffer overflow attacks, reverse engineering, binary analysis, vulnerability/exploit testing, and malware analysis.

Describe the process of obtaining your position. When did you hear of the position and submit your application?

I found the internship position listing on Glassdoor, which linked me to the Leidos website in October of last year. I was contacted shortly after applying to come in for an interview, and not long after that I was told that I got the internship.

Although I found and obtained my position outside of UMBC, I would highly recommend going to the Career Fair and attending recruiter workshops to get your name and face out there. I did, and it definitely gave me a chance to practice interviews and become more comfortable interacting with recruiters. 

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization? 

The people and work that I get to do. The people I met were all so intelligent and had so much knowledge, experience, and advice to share. I felt like I always learned something new by saying hi to someone new everyday. Having that great environment around me, and finally getting the chance to do real work in the field I love, was a dream come true.

How do you believe you have made an impact through your work?

The documentation of all the research my team and I did on the product was actually going to be sent to higher ups in order to help them make their final decision on whether or not Leidos should use the product within their systems and/or relay the product to Leidos customers.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience? 

Take advantage of the Career Fair and technical/recruiter workshops. Even if you do not get any responses back, it is networking experience to prepare for the day when you do land that interview.

During interviews, don't shy away from telling the interviewer what you aren't the most well-versed in. It's important for both you and them so that they place you in a position they think you'll enjoy and be good at. Also, if you're passionate about a certain subject, express it!

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Want to be the next Intern of the Week? Make sure to fill out this form and stay tuned. New interns are announced every Friday!